Ride Upon the Storm - a film review

I just wrapped up the final episode of Ride Upon the Storm, or Herrens Veje (The Lord's Ways) in the original Danish. Twenty hours of extremely intense, often overwrought emotionality, but so well written and acted that it is nonetheless one of the most streaming-worthy productions I've come across in a long time. Produced in 2017-8, I have no idea why it took this long to come my way. I had to get a Roku Viaplay account to access it. Netflix slapped me with a "Not available in your country" notice.  There are other ways, including VPN accounts, which will get you there.

It's probably the subject matter that keeps it from being as widely viewed as it deserves to be. Not that many people care all that much about the question of organized religion anymore. As a gay man, inculcated with self-loathing by organized religion from early childhood, I accept that I will never be free of a life-long fascination with the intersection of religion and politics and watch these things with a cobra-like fascination. As a psychotherapist once said to me when I tried to persuade him that religion no longer had a hold on me, "You may have eliminated the concrete images, but the molds they came in are still there."

I won't take the time to do more than sketch the broad outlines of the plot. If you want a more thorough summary, here's a good one.  

What makes Herrens Veje such a gripping drama is that it works on more than a single level.  It works much of the time as a theological, sociological, or ethical academic study. It's also a powerful character-driven soap opera. It's the story of a middle-class Danish heir to a family which has produced 250 years of clerics in the national Folkekirke, which, despite it's name ("People's Church") is a state-run national church, administered by bishops with centralized authority and considerable social standing.  Current head of the family is Johannes Krogh. He's married to Elisabeth and they have two sons, Christian and August. The story shifts as the focus shifts from Johannes the pastor, to Johannes the husband and father, and back again.

Somewhere in the first four or five episodes I realized the power of the writing and acting when I found myself raging against this man, Johannes, a tyrannical misanthropic bullying patriarch who appears to have only two real goals in life: maintaining his status and authority in the community as priest, and holding on to his power to dictate to the entire world around him which he assumes derives from that authority.  That much loathing for a fictional character is a clear indicator of good writing and/or good acting.

Johannes is mean-spirited, a perfect illustration of the theological construct of man-as-sinner. Some reviewers describe him as having a "godlike" power over his wife and his sons. To find that an appropriate choice of words is to define God in Old Testament terms, a being you cross at great peril. Elisabeth, his wife, is a companion piece, a buffer to her husband's expectations, but at the same time the kind of enabler that tyrants need to make their worlds go round. Rather than come to her sons' aid as they seek unsuccessfully to gain his approval, she tries to persuade them that their father is only showing his love by insisting they live up to his standards. In his own mind, of course, Johannes is "raising up a child in the way he should go," a model of Christian rectitude.

Christian, the older son, tries to get out from under his father's heavy hand, first by dropping out of his graduate degree program in theology and going for a degree in business instead, and then sabotaging that effort, disgracing himself by getting caught plagiarizing his dissertation and dropping out of school altogether. August is, by comparison, a golden boy. He follows his father's footsteps into the church and becomes a chaplain in Iraq, but then faces a moment of truth which changes his life. The two brothers share a love/hate relationship with their father and spend their lives shifting between standing up to him and buckling under.

I watched the first dozen or more episodes with rapt attention before the inevitable weakness kicked in that virtually all serials suffer from when they have to pad the plot line to keep the series going. At that point I began to realize I had been seeing things through a theological lens, watching the characters deal with heavy topics like the meaning of sin and the source of religious authority.  Luther broke from the Catholics and their belief in the importance of good works, arguing that we don't need to pursue forgiveness, that God granted it once and for all through his Son's sacrifice; our only obligation, as unworthy but forgiven sinners, is to embrace the gospel narrative as truth. 

And as the series (as I chose to view it) switched focus from theology to soap opera I began to be disappointed in the direction it was taking. I wanted to go on viewing things through the lens of a one-time Lutheran. I was at home with the doctrine of the three "solas" - sola fide, sola gratia, sola scriptura - only faith, only grace, only scripture - and began to take issue with how focus was taken off the central message of Lutheranism and the struggle for meaning and reworked into a father-son struggle for dominance and independence.  It pains me to have to admit, though, that there is no justification for critiquing a story for not being the story as you would have written it.

Christian has now once again taken up his father's way of life and decides to finish his theological dissertation.  For a time he tries earnestly to keep this a secret from his father, keeping in character. But when he turns to his father to help him work through a fine point of Kierkegaardian philosophy, it becomes clear that the authors of the series have decided enough theology already, we need to get out of these clouds and down to soap opera, if we are going to have any hope of retaining an audience.  At first I thought I was missing the point, that Johannes knew Christian was on the right track and only needed to summon the passion required to conclude this thesis on that note. But then I realized I was reading all this into the story, that Adam Price and the other writers had moved on to a simple, and more dramatic, battle of wills. 

All that notwithstanding, the story does continue on two levels simultaneously. The series takes up a wide array of topics currently separating modern-thinking churches from traditional conservative ones: patriarchal cultural practices, hollowed-out religion, substance abuse, euthanasia, homelessness and sexual orientation. All topics tearing modern churches apart as they struggle with polarized views. Topics begging theological explanations that get worked out in the non-churched world more as psychological dramas rather than intellectual debates about right and wrong in an academic context. "Pity," I thought to myself. I was enjoying being in the classroom again, wrestling with the question of ethics and morality. I was reminded once again that the world prefers to handle these heavy topics under the rubric of entertainment.

But the seriousness of Ride Upon the Storm cannot be dismissed quite that easily. If I have it right, that it is more soap opera than social criticism, I still have to ask the question, who comes off the worse for wear: Johannes the arrogant hypocrite,  or the church he comes to represent?  The lens through which I view Christianity is that it shares with communism the honor of being among the noblest of ideals ever to occur in the human mind. The problem with both these schools of thought is that they are unattainable goals. Just as we cannot live by the Marxist slogan, "From each according to his ability to each according to his needs," we cannot live up to the ideal of turning the other cheek, or selling all we have and giving to the poor." Just not in our nature. That means that what goes on in churches is a grand illusion. We're not Christian in the sense that we model our lives after Christ's teachings; we're Christian in the social sense, the tribal identity sense, people who would live in an ideal world if we could, but are content to live in the less-than-perfect world in which we find ourselves.  That helps explain why when young people confront the hypocrisy of their elders they leave the churches in droves. All it takes is somebody to point out the hypocrisy. We say we love our fellow man, but as the church council in this Danish hit piece demonstrated, when Johannes went all Christian and opened the church to the homeless, they were not about to allow them to come in and get dog hairs all over the cushions.

As a theological piece, Ride Upon the Storm" exposes the losing battle the church is having getting the next generation into the pews. The churches are not christian organizations, they are middle class social clubs for the most part - at least in the case of the Danish "folk-" church, the Church of England, and virtually all of the state churches around the world which mistake social conformity for Christian rectitude.  And it's not gentle satire; it's a right-between-the-eyes frontal attack on the failure of the churches to practice what they preach.

Ride Upon the Storm, whether you see it for its theological insights, its reflection of social realities, or аs a knock-down-drag-out psychological family drama, is a brilliant piece of work. A film in twenty episodes. Very much worth your time.

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Lasting peace

There is a demonstration going on at the Brandenburg Gate as I write, led by journalist Alice Schwarzer and leftist politician Sahra Wagenknecht, two prominent opinion makers in Germany. "Military experts admit that the war in Ukraine can't be won," they say, and from this they conclude that the only suitable response is to stop sending weapons to Ukraine for use in their defense against Putin's attack. It only prolongs the war and brings us closer to a possible nuclear engagement. The demonstration follows an anti-war manifesto Schwarzer and Wagenknecht have put out which has already gathered over half a million signatures.

On the other side, those defending the continued military support of Ukraine argue that such a unilateral shut-down would not lead to the desired ends. It would not lead to negotiations because Putin has had in mind from the beginning the complete destruction of Ukraine as a state separate from and outside of Moscow's control. On the contrary, this so-called armistice would play right into his hands, and give him time to get his forces together for a newer, even bigger assault on his neighbor. Which even a casual look at his past behavior indicates would be his course of action, and no evidence indicates he would be inclined to behave otherwise.

We sit here, on the other side of the world. The Germans are a whole lot closer, obviously, and they are highly conflicted over whether this is their fight to defend democracy in Europe. But while virtually the entire world not under Putin's control are inclined to come to Ukraine's defense, there is a raging battle over the next step to take. Do we throw our weight into one side of this campaign or the other?  Do we treat Ukraine as a heroic victim fighting for democracy, and thus for us all, or as a hothead who needs to be forced to cut their losses?  If we leave it to the Ukrainians to decide, they have made clear which way they will go: they want to defend their territory and their national identity. But what do we do?

Those arguing for continued military defense of Ukraine also argue that negotiations are the short-term goal and peace the obvious long-term goal. It's just, they say, that you have to negotiate from strength, not from weakness. Get Russia to back down. It's the obvious aggressor; everybody agrees about that. And the way to do that is to up the cost to them of maintaining the war, not handing them an "all is forgiven" card. "Keep your wins, Russia. Keep the huge chunks of our country you have managed to pull under your control already and we'll do the noble thing and stop the shooting?" Really. Put that thought into words and let it rattle around in your head for a while.

The Schwarzer-Wagenknechts of the world dangle the fact that hundreds of lives continue to be lost every day the fighting continues. Their argument sounds reasonable.

But where is the evidence that Putin would accept the offer to take his wins and go back home and pop some champagne corks? Where has he stated, or even hinted, that his lifetime goals of restoring Russian hegemony in Eastern Europe can be compromised? Where has he done anything but bomb homes,  water supplies, schools and hospitals, police and firemen? When has he shown any inclination to avoid a total war of all-out destruction, to wipe out, with total ruthlessness any and all resistence to his war of aggression? Where have his attacks been anything but brutal? Where is the evidence that this armistice could possibly calm the beast he has unleashed?

One of the great ironies of history is that modern-day Germans, long viewed, by my generation at least, as a bunch of folk inclined to march first and ask questions later, have demonstrated for a couple generations already a willingness to swing the pendulum in the other direction. Half of them are ready to lay down arms rather than fight - at precisely a moment where self-defense is called for.  The definition is all. Is this a call for peace? Or is it throwing their Ukrainian neighbors under the bus and mislabeling it peace?

As historian Karl Schlögel points out in a German TV interview today, at the heart of the hesitation to send tanks and other munitions into the war to help Ukraine comes from German guilt over the memory of German tanks rolling across the Soviet Union during World War II. But Germans are missing the irony. Much of the war was fought in Ukraine. Today's resistance to fighting "Russia" is actually leading to preventing the Ukrainians from resisting Russian aggression. It takes a minute to get your mind around that.

Standing up to bullies is something we all face at some point in our lives. We are faced with avoiding further blows at all costs or standing up and fighting back. The glaring question is when has giving in to a bully ever been the best long-term course of action?  Violence is, along with deceit, one of the two complete evils in the world. Avoiding violence has its own undeniable justification. 

We have to decide, at each step along the way, whether the instinct to lay down our arms is one we need to listen to. Or whether it is a mask, only a prelude to more violence.

If the word peace does not have the word lasting in front of it, it is not peace. It is illusion.

Impact Airing

"Jeder Schuss, ein Russ; jeder Stoss, ein Franzos'," the German army slogan went in the First World War. "Every shot, a Russian; Every push, a Frenchman."  

I heard that when I was a kid, and thought it was funny. Too remote from my life to take seriously. Too far back in history.

Thanks to the internet I just learned that there's a recording of this slogan in a song. And it continues:

"Und die Artillerie nicht faul [And the artillery (do) not (be) lazy]

gebt den Britten auf das Maul" [Give it to the Brits in the mouth."]

Stoss, which can mean everything from "push...shove...jab...thrust... punch" to "impact," is now making the rounds in Germany in the compound, "Stosslüften." Luft you will recognize as "air" as in Lufthansa, the German airlines, or Luftwaffe, the German air force. When used as a verb, lüften, "to air," as in "ventilate," it is a neologism, and means something like "to air out (a room). The compound with Stoss in it suggests it should be done with force.

When I first went to Germany back in 1960 there were two things that brought home the fact that I was in an alien land.  I had never realized that in the U.S., the default state of a room was one where the doors were left open. In Germany I was scolded by older relatives for not closing the door behind me, and I observed they were not exceptional in their expectations. The German default state for a door was closed. And if you think about it further, it may occur to you that Americans have always had the luxury of wide-open spaces, and often build their houses where one room opens into another and there is no divider between them. In Europe generally, Germany being no exception, people often lived until recent times in single rooms, and one closed doors both to keep the warmth in when the heat was on, and for privacy.

In my dark culture-shock moments I took that as a metaphor for what the Germans could be: closed-minded and rigid. Once I began to find Germany a less hostile place, I explained it away by reminding myself that Germans lived through the war without central heating. My great uncle would raise his newspaper closer and closer to the window to capture the light as the sun went down; only after it was quite dark would he turn on a light. Ironically, these days, I have enough money to live comfortably, but I also live in California where houses like mine don't have furnaces. We heat with a gas fireplace and space heaters and I regularly lecture the dogs on the importance of closing the door behind them, to keep the heat in. We're still working on that.

The second thing that struck me was a curiosity of train etiquette.  I had a lot of relatives to meet and I spent a lot of time on trains, where cars had compartments with seats for six people, three on one side, three, facing them, on the other. In America, we didn't travel much by train, but when we did, the seats were all facing forward and you could go from start to destination without speaking to your fellow travelers at all. In Germany, at least in 1960, it seemed like there would always be somebody who wanted to open the window. When they did, they'd immediately turn to the other passengers and ask, "Zieht's?" - [Is there a draft?]

My online German-English dictionary incorrectly tells me that this new post-covid verb, stosslüften should be translated "impact ventilation" - I say "incorrect" because "ventilation" is not a verb. They're no more helpful with the corresponding noun, Stosslüftung.  That word, they say, means "inrush airing." It makes sense, once somebody explains this German preoccupation with airing closed spaces out. It was an obsession before covid; since covid it has become an even bigger one. Some housing contracts have "airing out your rooms" written in as a requirement.

Brave new world, where virtues of old (avoiding drafts) are giving way to new virtues (freeze your ass off, convince yourself it's a good way to avoid covid - and it also protects against mildew.)  Check out here and here and here, if you don't believe me.

In the U.S., Republicans and Democrats are still at swords' point over whether masking and distancing is simply advisable, if that, or whether it should be required. When my husband, who won't let me go shopping because I'm old and have weak lungs, comes in with the groceries, the first words out of his mouth are a report on how many people were wearing masks. He's really upset about Biden's suggestion that they are no longer absolutely necessary.

Germany and the U.S. once went to war over whether Hitler should rule the world. The good guys won that one and we were able to move on to things of lesser import, such as whether doors should be left open or closed. We've continued to close the gap. Deutsche Bahn, the German railroad system, are now breathing a sigh of relief that their train personnel no longer have to face angry passengers who refuse to wear masks. The amount of violence against them had increased by 25% in 2022 over 2021.

The conservatives have won this battle, for now. It remains to be seen whether this is a good move, whether the requirement was more trouble than it was worth.

It also remains to be seen whether Germans are willing to go to jail for refusing to follow the requirement in their contract to open wide their doors and windows, even in mid-winter. And whether Germans want to prioritize keeping the heat in now that Putin has turned off the gas so he can fight his war of aggression on the Ukrainians. Or whether they want to get their people to air out their rooms - "by force."

Sometimes planet earth is a very curious place.

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Getting from here to there

I asked my niece, Amy, the other day what she would be doing if she had not chosen international relations as a profession, if she had it to do all over again. "Geography," she said. "I'd study geography." I absolutely loved that idea, since I play that game all the time. Not sure I'd want to be a geographer professionally, but I would love to spend a good chunk of my childhood as a geography nerd. I've been doing that in recent months, as the destruction of Ukraine continues to dominate the news and I need to have other things to focus on. 

"Poor Mexico," they say, "So far from God and so close to the United States." You'd have to say the same for Ukraine. At least we don't try to spread the fiction that Mexico is not a real place, that it's a part of the U.S., and we have the right to bite off chunks of it at will. (We did that when my home state of California was taken from them and turned into an anglo-saxon enclave, but that's another story.)

So are the blunders that Putin has made another story. But there is a tie-in with geography there too.

Just as the war criminal George W. Bush, who started a war in Iraq because he couldn't tell a Shia from a Sunni and missed the fact that the 9/11 attackers were Saudis... just as his war in Iraq killed an estimated 300,000 Iraqis, and considerably more if you add in the results of illness, disease, malnutrition and the like, and handed the Iranians a Shiite victory over their Sunni neighbors, Putin's war, waged to conquer Ukraine and push back against the growing specter of NATO on his doorstep ended up getting neutral Sweden and Finland to give up generations of neutrality and join NATO. These jokers are leaders?

The idiocies don't stop there. Putin tells his media-captivated countrymen he's fighting Nazis. The president of Ukraine, a guy recognized by both Ukrainians and most of the world as well as a national hero, is a Jew. Putin annexes much of Eastern Ukraine, where many people speak Russian as a first language. But they also would prefer life outside of Russian control, much as the citizens of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Georgia, Kazakhstan and other former soviet republics do. And that's just the eastern half of Ukraine. The western half has long been more conspicuously anti-Russian, pro-European. There is such irony in the fact that Putin, just as he blundered by driving Sweden and Finland to want to join NATO, has managed to unite the Russian-speaking part of the country with the Ukrainian-speaking part against him.

I need to escape the intensity of the war news from time to time, and one of the things I have fun with is geography.  I've been enjoying the fact that Google maps provides you with just about all the geography trivia you can  handle. 

Consider this: if you were to travel from the northernmost town in the U.S. to the southernmost town, how long would it take you by plane, car, bicycle or on foot?

If you took the most direct route, how many Canadian provinces would you go through and how many states?

I don't like playing guessing games when the answers are easily available, so I'll give you the answers. First off, you can walk the just over three miles from Prudhoe Bay (the northernmost town in the U.S.) to the Deadhorse Airport in Deadhorse, Alaska. That would take you about an hour. Or you could go by bicycle in about fifteen minutes. Or by car or taxi in about seven to ten.

From Deadhorse Airport (SCC) you would fly to Key West (EYW), stopping three times: in Anchorage (ANC), Seattle/Tacoma Airport (SEA) and George Bush International Airport in Houston. If you want to avoid any association with George Bush, you can pay $151 more and fly via Tampa, instead. Both Tampa and Houston have direct flights into Key West. Houston also has flights that touch down in Charlotte, Fort Worth or Miami along the way, but you can fly direct if you want to.  Best get an experienced travel agent to give you the time it would take because there are many choices of routes and airlines, and the direct routes are not necessarily the cheapest.  But I'd count on not getting there in less than twenty-one hours, and many take ten or more than that.

You could drive, of course, and that trip, a distance of 5487 miles (8830 km) would take you about 90 hours. A very hard nine days, driving ten hours a day, or a more reasonable two and a half weeks, more or less, driving about five hours a day.

And if you're hardy, and can handle the hills, you could go by bicycle. If you do that, you can cut about twenty-four miles off the journey, and do it in 5463 miles, or 8791 km. That should take you about 450 hours, give or take.   That's forty-five ten-hour days, and since there are precious few athletes alive who could handle that, I'd suggest you allot three months, and cut that down to five-hours a day on the bicycle.

Then there's the third option: to hoof it. Don't know how that works those long initial miles through the Yukon Territory. I have no idea whether it's ever been done. It's 56 km from the first town, Beaver Creek, to the second town, Koidern, or about an eleven hour and a half walk. And if you make that, it's another 86.7 km to the next town, Quill Creek, or a seventeen and a half hour hike on foot. And those long treks don't end there. From Teslin, still in the Yukon, to the next town, Swift River, Yukon, a route which takes you into the Northern parts of British Columbia, it would take you over 23 hours. No thank you by a long shot.  And we haven't begun to tap into the long endless treks through Alberta, Saskatchewan, North Dakota and Northern Minnesota before you get to even slightly more populated places in Wisconsin (or Iowa - you can choose either route) and Illinois.

Once you get to Illinois you have to hike the entire state from north to south. Then you walk through a little part of Western Kentucky, and you get to Tennessee, another state you traverse from North to South. Then Georgia - again full trek North to South. Then Florida - again full trek North to South.

I suppose there are venturesome folk out there who might want to give it a go, but I've just completely wiped myself out, particularly now when it's all I can do to walk twenty minutes around a couple blocks here in Berkeley.

Those who can, do; those who can't, teach, we used to say; and somebody would usually pipe up, "And those who can't teach teach teachers how to teach."

I see a parallel here.

Those who can't walk anymore imagine walking from one end of Estados Unidos to the other, just for the hell of it.

Back now to the Netflix menu of mass shootings, car accidents, crime, corruption or social decay that seem to be all the rage these days.

Mine eyes have seen better days. I actually used to read ten or more hours a day, but now two is a real stretch.

And I used to be able to hike at least half that much.

You'll understand now why I've turned to Rachmaninoff and Chopin.

And, of course, Google maps. 

Do you know how far it is from Lavry, in the Pskov District of Russia, right up next to Estonia, to the Big Diomede Island, from which (pace Sarah Palin) you can see the United States?  Those are the westernmost and easternmost points in Russia. Google maps tells me, and I quote: Sorry, your search appears to be outside our current coverage area for driving.

I know it's about 8000 km and spans ten time zones, but I can't seem to find anybody who can tell me how long it would take to walk or bike it.